Made during the darkest days of the Nazi occupation of Denmark, Day of Wrath portrays a society terrorized by ideology and by a ruthless police force and judicial system. Set in a seventeenth-century town whose citizens harbor hyperbolic fears of witchcraft, and where both young lovers and an older generation struggle with questions of morality and justice, the film speaks unmistakably to the contemporary situation in Europe.

Poetic use of landscape and architecture lend an atmospheric intensity and visual beauty to the film that draws on elements of an older Scandinavian cinema. Like such other Dreyer masterpieces as The Passion of Joan of Arc and Vampyr, Days of Wrath creates intense moral drama from the most economic but powerful cinematic means.